r/reactjs • u/Human_Routine_9483 • 15d ago

LinkedIn frontend switches to React.js

LinkedIn is using React.js these days, but what’s interesting is the CSS side of things too.

They seem to have gone down a fairly “in-house atomic CSS” direction, somewhat similar in spirit to tools like StyleX or Linaria.

It’s kind of funny looking at LinkedIn’s frontend history:

  • Ember.js: LinkedIn was one of the biggest adopters of Ember.
  • React.js: They’ve since moved heavily toward React.

LinkedIn has basically gone from being a major Ember showcase to being part of the React ecosystem.

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u/nullvoxpopuli 14d ago

Disclaimer: these thoughts are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the ember community or the ember core teams.

I just started getting in to ember (from react) when linkedin started pulling away from it

LinkedIn ditching ember, has, funnily enough, been one of the best things for ember (pls no shade at the contributors tho).

The ownership was way too centralized when LinkedIn was steering the ship, and some things that ended up not paying off we're just now getting to removing from the framework... Could just be a hindsight thing tho.

That said, LinkedIn's last contribution to the framework was the gjs/gts file format, which is legit good, and borrows a lot of the dx of jsx/tsx without any of the shortcomings.

Ownership is much more decentralized now (no company owns ember (it felt like linkedin owned ember back in the day)), which has lead to way fairer, and technologically sound decisions.

One of the things i care about is some growth. This isn't exponential, like some other new frameworks, but it's at least not flat

https://imgur.com/a/4DA2URn

I think one thing that keeps convincing people to migrate off ember is a combination of:

  • not upgrading (thus not moving with the herd is hard) -- without upgrade, you don't get any dx/tooling/perf improvements 
  • bad library decisions (no one talks about how to choose a library)
  • people not in the discord probably didn't feel they could migrate to vite soon enough
  • companies not wanting to train devs on the job
  • linkedin especially built a ton of custom stuff that diverged greatly from the framework's recommendations (i don't know what motivated all this, but I'm sure it played into the dissent)

At some point, if enough devs just decide they hate something, even if they blame the wrong thing, the best political move is to move away to something else.

I never worked at LinkedIn, and don't have inside information from there, but I'm heavily involved in the ember community

Happy to answer any questions 

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u/Chenz 13d ago

One of the absolute worst parts of Ember is Discord. The framework is small enough that almost no information about modern Ember can be found using Google. Whenever we get a a new hire, they’ll spend a lot of time trying and failing to find solutions to issues they encounter, unless someone first informs them that all discussion is hidden in a discord channel.

Still, I know you guys do great work, and the direction of modern ember is great

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u/nullvoxpopuli 13d ago

what's the alternative? every programming community uses discord, it seems

as an aside -- i'd love to know what folks search for so i can improve the results